White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

that it won’t spread along the boarding tunnel to the waiting ship or into the

main concourse. The system can be overridden at this end, but only by a special

key carried by the Nidian senior ground staff member on duty in the lounge. Have

you seen this being?”

“Yes,” MacEwan said grimly. “It was standing at the exit port just before the

crash. I think it is somewhere underneath the transporter.”

Grawlya-Ki whined quietly, then went on, “The Colonel is using his personal

radio to contact a docked Monitor Corps vessel to try to patch into the port

network that way, but so far without effect. The Nidian rescue teams are doing

all the talking and are not listening to outsiders. But if he gets through he

wants to know what to tell them. The number and condition of the casualties, the

degree of contamination, and optimum entry points for the rescue teams. He wants

to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” MacEwan said. He did not know enough to be able

to make a useful situation report, and until he did their time could be used to

much better effect than worrying out loud to the Colonel. He pointed to an

object which looked like a gray, bloodstained sack which twitched and made

untranslatable sounds, and said, “That one first.”

The injured Kelgian was difficult to move, MacEwan found, especially when there

was just one Orligian arm and two human ones to take the weight. Grawlya-Ki’s

mask was such a bad fit that it had to hold it in position. The casualty was a

caterpillar-like being with more than twenty legs and an overall covering of

silvery fur now badly bloodstained. But the body, although no more massive than

that of a human, was completely flaccid. There seerned to be no skeleton, no

bony parts at all except possibly in the head section, but it felt as though

there were wide, concentric bands of muscle running the length of the body just

underneath the fur.

It rolled and flopped about so much that by the time he had raised it from the

floor, supporting its head and midsection between his outstretched arms and

chest—Grawlya-Ki had the toil gripped between its side and free arm—one of the

wounds began bleeding. Because MacEwan was concentrating on hold­ing the

Kelgian’s body immobile as they moved it toward the boarding tunnel entrance,

his mind was not on his feet; they became tangled in a piece of decorative

curtain, and he fell to his knees. Immediately the Kelgian’s blood began to well

out at an alarming rate.

“We should do something about that,” the Orligian said, its voice muffled by the

too-small mask. “Any ideas?”

The Service had taught MacEwan only the rudiments of first

aid because casualties in a space war tended to be explosive decompressions and

rarely if ever treatable, and what little he had learned applied to beings of

his own species. Serious bleed­ing was controlled by cutting off the supply of

blood to the wound with a tourniquet or local pressure. The Kelgian’s

cir­culatory system seemed to be very close to its skin, possibly because those

great, circular bands of muscle required lots of blood. But the position of the

veins were hidden by the being’s thick fur. He thought that a pad and tight

bandages were the only treatment possible. He did not have a pad and there was

no time to go looking for one, but there was a bandage of sorts still wrapped

loosely around his ankle.

He kicked the length of plastic curtain off his foot, then pulled about two

meters free of the pile of debris which had fallen with it. The stuff was tough

and he needed all his strength to make a transverse tear in it, but it was wide

enough to cover the wound with several inches to spare. With the Orligian’s help

he held the plastic in position over the wound and passed the two ends around

the cylindrical body, knotting them very tightly together.

Probably the makeshift bandage was too tight, and where it passed around the

Kelgian’s underside it was pressing two sets of the being’s legs against the